SUPER BOWL TV / The biggest upset -- game beats ads

"And that's the way you should win a Super Bowl!" said John Madden, perfectly summing up a TV spectacle that, 98 percent of the time, fails to live up to its own hype.

Not this time. Super Bowl XXXVI had one of those unbeatable mixes. A favorite nobody outside of New England -- and if truth be told, probably half of that territory, too -- thought would lose. A last-second, clock-beating upset. A victory by a team called the Patriots that made some kind of weird, sappy sense, post-Sept. 11. And along the way, some pretty good commercials and a superb halftime show.

Shock the world, indeed.

It's funny in a funny-odd sort of way how nothing happened like it was supposed to. There was no Rams track meet. No blowout. Millions of people weren't tuning out and firing up the crock pot in the second quarter. Despite a downturn in the economy, some of that Super Bowl advertising money was actually well spent. And it might have been the first time in history that Playboy Bunnies got ignored (did anyone really turn the channel?).

It all started with the same kind of overkilling pomp and circumstance that saturates all pregame shows, but especially Super Bowl pregame shows. Yet when the Rams could muster only three lousy points instead of, say, the 31 or so most people expected in the first few minutes of action, you got the sense that things would be different. Boy, were they.

We never got to the point, as everyone suspected, where longtime announcing team John Madden and the retiring Pat Summerall would get touchy-feely-weepy about the breakup of their long and successful partnership. There was just too much action, too much good football, to really care what they were saying.

Eventually, after the game, when all the ribbon shreds had hit the plastic turf, there was time to get into that burly man I-love-you-buddy thing. There was even a videotaped retrospective. But at that point, lovely as it was, who wasn't spent?

Britney Spears is dressed as a hippie in a 2002 Pepsi commercial to be braodcast during the Super Bowl. Spears reprises Pepsi's jingles dating as far back as the 1950s in the commercials . (AP Photo/HO)

Britney Spears is dressed as a hippie in a 2002 Pepsi commercial to be braodcast during the Super Bowl. Spears reprises Pepsi's jingles dating as far back as the 1950s in the commercials . (AP Photo/HO)

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Britney Spears is dressed as a hippie in a 2002 Pepsi commercial to be braodcast during the Super Bowl. Spears reprises Pepsi's jingles dating as far back as the 1950s in the commercials . (AP Photo/HO)

Britney Spears is dressed as a hippie in a 2002 Pepsi commercial to be braodcast during the Super Bowl. Spears reprises Pepsi's jingles dating as far back as the 1950s in the commercials . (AP Photo/HO)

SUPER BOWL TV / The biggest upset -- game beats ads

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Hey, we had just witnessed the biggest upset in Super Bowl history: Who knew the Britney Spears Pepsi ad would be so, so, unspecial?

Ah, the ads. There was a time -- right up until the kickoff, actually -- when pretty much everybody not wearing Rams or Pats hats was thinking that the ads would be the best thing about the day. There was a lot of wasted millions on Sunday, no question, and it wasn't all on the Rams offense.

Britney. The E-Trade monkey. That annoying Mlife thing. The Lipton tea campaign. The first Led Zeppelin songs ever permitted to hawk goods. All wasted. Bad ads.

But you had to love Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron. That Charles Schwab ad hit it out of the park and into the cove. It was the best commercial all day. Other winners included:

-- Quizno's. Wow. Never heard of them. But that blow dart thing was pretty funny.

-- Bud Light scored time and time again. From the rampaging, bottle-cap popping hawk to the "So, how much?" one-liner to the dissection of how women and men pick out sentimental cards.

-- Visa's "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" was inspired (if not a few years too late).

-- The Bud Clydesdales paying tribute to New York? Why not? Just don't milk it any harder, please. There's an ultra-thin line between respect and greedy marketing.

-- Even those anti-drug ads that link illicit teenage purchases to the funding of terrorism came off well enough.

Granted, it wasn't a banner year for the ads, but the game is supposed to outshine them anyway. It's an old, mostly unacknowledged, unfollowed rule, but it's there. You could look it up. Besides, everyone had already said the ads would be lousy, so any yuks you got should just be considered a bonus.

Mariah? Whatever. The real deal was an inspired bit of rock from U2 as the halftime entertainment. Here's a quick pop quiz: Has the halftime show ever been good? Ever? Pencils down. Correct answer: Not in our lifetime. And yet, U2's live breath of fresh air and dramatic, emotional spectacle that paid homage to the victims of Sept. 11 was both daringly bombastic and also pretty damn cool.

Fox had very few letdowns on its hands. Going live to U.S. soldiers in Kandahar was a good idea, but somebody should have figured out the time delay. As much as the GIs probably wanted to wave placards to loved ones, they at least got a game that gave them some much-needed entertainment.

All told, this was one Super Sunday that delivered on all fronts -- from entertainment to actual game -- and that, period, is the biggest upset of any Super Bowl.